‘Safe’ Nuclear Meme Shattered by Fukushima Expose in Leading Journal

14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout … Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count … An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima. Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. – PRNewswire-USNewswire

Dominant Social Theme: It’s bad but it can’t be helped. Nuclear power is the wave of the future.

Free-Market Analysis: The slow poisoning of Japanese citizens is going unreported in the West except for some dedicated journals and web-reports including, importantly, Rense.com, which has stayed on the story seemingly every day. It is a very important one, because it encompasses numerous elite/societal trends and their successes and failures.

There are elite dominant social themes attached to nuclear power, of course. The biggest one has to do with complexity. In a world dominated by an Anglosphere power elite, the way to global domination is via intense complexity. Make a person’s world insupportable without an extremely complex infrastructure and that person will be far more malleable than one who can survive on little.

Enter nuclear power, which is surely among the most complex sources of energy ever invented. Early man picked up sticks to make a fire. Now it takes tens of billions of dollars to generate energy and hundreds of people to fan the flames.

Of course, such complexity has a cost. Nuclear plants, as they’ve been constructed, are apparently accidents waiting to happen. That’s another dominant social theme, or a sub dominant one anyway: Let’s not mention the accidents. They make it sound like nuclear energy is unsafe. It is, of course, but we’ll pretend it’s not.

And pretend they have. That’s what always happens these days. Western governments are relying more and more on pretense as the building blocks of REAL civilization are eroded by the falsities of Money Power.

But there is now the Internet. And thanks to this era of the Internet, reality increasingly intrudes. As we have pointed out in the past, even if the Internet were shut down tomorrow, it has already informed several generations (around the world) of the Way Things Really Work.

The power elite uses dominant social themes as fear-based promotions designed to frighten Western middle classes into giving up power and wealth to globalist institutions like the UN. But what we call the Internet Reformation is making these themes increasingly irrelevant.

Nuclear power is likely one such increasingly irrelevant theme. The elites may like its complexity, but not many others do. The elites may wish to keep quiet about the dangers of nuclear power and let people die of secret poisoning. But these days it’s hard to accomplish that.

And now there is this: what seems to us a fairly definitive article in the 40-year old International Journal of Health Services. “Of the major English-language health policy journals, the IJHS ranks in the top five for frequency of citation of its articles in the scientific literature,” according to the publisher’s website. Here’s some more from the article:

The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks. The IJHS article will be published Tuesday and will be available online as of 11 a.m. EST at www.radiation.org.

Just six days after the disastrous meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima on March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores. Subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S. …

Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, MPH MBA, said: “This study of Fukushima health hazards is the first to be published in a scientific journal. It raises concerns, and strongly suggests that health studies continue, to understand the true impact of Fukushima in Japan and around the world.

Findings are important to the current debate of whether to build new reactors, and how long to keep aging ones in operation.”Mangano is executive director, Radiation and Public Health Project, and the author of 27 peer-reviewed medical journal articles and letters.

This is pretty damning stuff. The catastrophes are adding up: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Something else is adding up as well: the foundering of elite dominant social themes in the Internet era. Whether it is global warming, peak oil, central banking or even the war on terror, people are increasingly skeptical of government promotions.

Of course, the pushback never ends. The Anglosphere power elites own and control the mainstream media and thus each and every dominant social theme continues to be supported. In the case of this Fukushima study, the rebuttals are already beginning, courtesy of Scientific American that already published an article, “Researchers Trumpet Another Flawed Fukushima Death Study.”

The author, Michael Moyer, writes that the authors’ statistical claims “are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths.” He basically accuses the authors of alarmism and calls the study “sloppy, agenda-driven work”

But a quick scan of the comments below Moyer’s article also reveals something interesting: accusations that the statistics that Moyers himself relies on comes from the Japanese government that has a vested interest in reducing the level of alarm surrounding Fukushima.

Of course, this brings up an even more fundamental issue. In the past, a rebuttal such as Moyer has written would likely have sufficed to stigmatize the alarmists and place such arguments at the periphery of the debate. Not so today. It is not enough anymore simply to cite government statistics and arguments. The credibility of this sort of approach is leaking away.

The elites will not be able to salvage nuclear power via statistical arguments. It has been a failing meme for some time. But if there is anything good to come out of Fukushima it may be not so much that nuclear power is dead (certainly it’s dying) but that there will be even more pressure to investigate alternative forms of energy.

Nuclear power (as currently constituted, anyway) is a ridiculously costly and complex way of generating power. It is a 20th century solution and the conversation has moved on. Whether it is cold fusion or Tesla’s ideas, which are not so far-fetched when you consider them seriously, the 21st century may bring renewed insights about energy secrets that have either been repressed by the elites or at least not fully investigated.

Conclusion: Maybe something “good” may emerge from Fukushima, though it will not help the poor unfortunates who have sickened and died as a result of this latest energy catastrophe.